We didn’t see this one coming.
The supposedly malicious hack on Anthem, first disclosed in February, that compromised the personal data of as many as 80 million people might not be about the black market after all.
Sure, stolen medical records, including coveted insurance ID numbers, still are orders of magnitude more valuable than financial records. Sure, we know state actors like China, North Korea and Russia are spying on us. Espionage is big business; after all, there’s a new James Bond movie coming out next week.
We thought for months that China was behind the hackers who stole records from Anthem, Premera Blue Cross, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and other health insurers. We assumed they just wanted money or diplomatic leverage.
Nope, according to a Financial Times report. The FBI and other investigators have concluded that China just wants to improve its own healthcare industry.
“The Chinese hackers had trained their sights on the U.S. health sector to help the country understand how other nations deal with medical care, people familiar with the Anthem investigation said,” according to the FT story.
Sure, as FT reported, Anthem does cover a lot of U.S. government employees, so there might be some intelligence value in the stolen data, but it probably really was just about structuring insurance policies. I mean, how could we not trust the intentions of a country symbolized by a big, cuddly panda?
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Flickr user toehk
